Wednesday, December 21, 2011

Morgan Stanley Destroyed Everything

. . . are the words of former Morgan Stanley Executive Director, Allison Schieffelin, who publicly exposed the insidious culture of this bank in 2004, after having to endure a three-year nightmare of baseless vicious retaliatory attacks.

Allison was an Executive Director at Morgan Stanley working as a Sales Person in the Fixed Income Group. She had been employed at Morgan Stanley for 15 years until she was abruptly fired without warning in October 2000 for what Morgan Stanley said was "gross insubordination" and for "initiating an abusive confrontation with her boss", going on to describe her as "an angry bitter woman who doesn't have a life". Just prior to her firing, she was subjected to a something known as "workplace mobbing", where she was suddenly excluded from client meetings, disparaged internally and given poor performance reviews predicated entirely on falsehoods.

After Morgan Stanley fired her, she was unable to find comparable work, for she too was the target of a malicious smear campaign engineered by Morgan Stanley, with the assistance of Kirkland & Ellis ("MS/K&E"), who operated in the background.

⇨ " . . . engaged in activities that were the 'kiss of death' to my career"

⇨ " . . . isolated and marginalized me"

She aptly summarized the primary intent of MS/K&E's dastardly deeds as follows: "They thought if they made my life miserable enough that I would just pack up and leave". But Allison Schieffelin persevered, and with the assistance of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission led a discrimination lawsuit based on her travails and on behalf of other women, eventually prevailing with a $54 million settlement, of which she was paid $12 million for damages associated with the destruction of her career and extensive pain and suffering. Importantly, she helped bring about meaningful change in the fight against sex discrimination in the workplace.